The talented 38-year-old Copenhagen cult filmmaker Nicolas
Winding
Refn ("Pusher"/"Bleeder"/"Fear X") helms this stylish kick ass
sympathetic
but revealing biopic of the notorious and pitiful British felon Michael
Gordon Peterson (given the handle of Death Wish actor Charles Bronson
by
a bare-knuckle boxing promoter), who has spent a large chunk of his
adult
life in solitary confinement, where he has managed to become a physical
fitness expert and an award-winning poet and artist. Bronson (Tom
Hardy)
was arrested in 1974 at age 22, and sentenced to seven years in prison
for armed robbery of a post office. Since then the anti-social career
convict
has spent 34 years in prison and only four of those years were not in
solitary
confinement (some misinformed do-gooders have signed a petition calling
for his release because he never killed, raped or molested anyone--but
after seeing this film I think anyone signing that petition could be
viewed
as daffy).

There's not much to this tale exceptfor the
powerful portrayal
by Hardy of the brutish, muscular, volatile, bald, mustachioed, raging
bull of a psychopath, who needs little provocation to beat up guards,
fellow
prisoners, and anybody else he encounters that rubs him the wrong way.
The frightful monstrous man veers between giving a showy comical
running
monologue explaining his itch to be a celebrity and his inexplicable
violent
uncontrollable rages where he sometimes puts on body war paint for more
effect.

The plotless pic is atmospheric, dynamic, aesthetic,
brutally and
comically cartoonish, and seemingly as happy as a pig rolling in slop
when
its anti-hero acts frighteningly as an insane brute. It seems like a
follow-up
to Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, but with nothing to add intellectually
it teeters on shoving in the viewer's face that violence in our modern
Western society is enjoyable as family entertainment as long as we're
out
of harm's way. I know I didn't enjoy the violence, but was impressed by
Refn's ability to make such an unpleasant story into such a stunningly
beautiful artistic looking film. It asks without trying to answer, What
do we do with those whose art is violence?